(When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again,
many people seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by chance.)

Peter Handke, “Lied vom Kindsein.”

Thereafter all his dreams and plays were inspired by the magic words, “When I’m five an’ can see.” The sentence served as a mental spring-board to jump his imagination off into a world of wonder where he could see “dest—dest as good as big folks.”

“When I’m Five” is a sung by a child who wants to be a child. Or to be more precise, a true child, a child of five or seven, one who seemingly has the business of childhood sorted out. Age is the most salient of childhood’s hierarchies; age truly matters, each year has its own weight and presence, in a way it never quite does again. To a four-year-old, a seven-year-old (the first climacteric year, the year of permanent teeth) is an aspiration, a 10-year-old is a high master, while those over 13 belong to the Great Otherwhere, a sullen land full of dark, awful mystery.

Bowie’s “When I’m Five” is a thematic sequel to “There Is a Happy Land” (not just thematic—Bowie reuses “Happy Land”‘s bridge). Where the latter was sung by an all-seeing narrator who occasionally took the voice of the children he observed, “When I’m Five” is entirely first-person. It’s both endearing and embarrassing—Bowie sings in a pinched, awkward voice (matched visually by his mime-like performance in the promo film Love You Till Tuesday) and performs without a trace of self-consciousness. It feels quite personal for a Bowie lyric, which up until now have rarely been autobiographical: there’s a reference to “my Grandfather Jones,” as well as a crying father and a mother who keeps secrets tucked away in a drawer.

While “When I’m Five” is embedded deep in the mind of childhood, there’s also a flavor of departure in it—the child wants to grow up, if at first just to be a greater child, but escape and adulthood are his final aims. The adult world, with all its worries, pettiness and wonders (spitting tobacco, marching in army parades, marriage), has come flooding in. After a period in which British pop music had been besotted with childhood, a change appears to be coming, darkness and strife on the horizon.

Bowie cut a demo of the song in early 1968, while the only proper recording he made of it was at a BBC session on 13 May 1968—the BBC version was the soundtrack to the “When I’m Five” sequence in Love You Till Tuesday. The Beatstalkers were convinced to cover the song, and released their bewildered version on their last single, c/w, appropriately, “Little Boy” (CBS 3936). It marked the end, both of the band’s connection to Bowie’s music and of the band itself.

In Victoria Station Bowie overheard a West Indian family calling “London bye ta-ta!” to relatives boarding a train out of town. And the song Bowie wrote with that title is, in part, about immigrant London: a city that, by the end of the ’60s, had a rising population of West Indians, various Africans, Pakistanis, Indians and other nationalities. Many of the newcomers had been members of the British Commonwealth or of its former colonies—the result was a new complexion for the UK (the BBC: in 1945, Britain’s non-white residents were in the low thousands, by 1970 they were approximately 1.4 million). Reaction was swift: Enoch Powell‘s notoriety (or infamy) began a month after Bowie first recorded “London Bye Ta-Ta,” one of several songs of the period to touch on immigration (not only was The Beatles’ “Get Back” originally a satire on Powell, the “get back to where you once belonged” addressed to Pakistanis, but “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da”‘s title was coined by the Nigerian conga player Jimmy Scott, a friend of McCartney’s.)

One of Bowie’s prettiest ’60s songs, “London Bye Ta-Ta” is also the latest variation on Bowie’s provincials-come-to London theme, in the line of “Can’t Help Thinking About Me,” and “The London Boys.” What’s fine here is a broadening of perspective—two young bohemians meet and flirt, but the singer also realizes they’re part of a greater exodus, mere ripples in a sea of population change. Everyone flooding into town is looking for some form of renewal: a new name, a new face, a better job. “The poet in the clothes shop sold me curry for a pound,” the singer recalls in passing. London has become, seemingly overnight, a strange young town.

It’s a rewrite of “Threepenny Pierrot,” though Bowie greatly improves the song in revision. “Threepenny” is just a catchy chorus and a tinkly little verse; “London Bye Ta-Ta” keeps the chorus but the verse is now in three stages—first just four descending notes (“gi-gi-gi-gi,” “red light green light”) countered by four rising ones (“take me away,” “make up your mind”) punctuated by a clang, then four bars of developing melody (with a third chord, G, finally introduced—it’s only been D and C up to now). It leads to the verse’s final and loveliest four-bar section, in which a neat guitar riff anchors an upward sweep of Tony Visconti’s strings arrangement and, even higher, Bowie’s vocal.

“London Bye Ta-Ta,” as much as it captures the beauty and sweep of a city in the flush of reinventing itself, winds up a tragedy. The two kids don’t make it:

She loves to love all beauty,
And she says the norm is funny
But she whimpers in the morning
When she finds she has no money

“I loved her! I loved her!” the singer pleads with us. But he’s out the door all the same.

Recorded on 12 March 1968 (it was proposed as the B-side to the rejected “In the Heat of the Morning” single); also cut a day later for the BBC (the version linked to above, which is on Bowie at the Beeb). Bowie still thought it had potential and considered it as a follow-up single to “Space Oddity,” cutting a revised version (with Marc Bolan on guitar) between 8-15 January 1970. But it was ultimately scrapped, and the Bolan version wasn’t released until the 1989 Sound and Vision compilation.

This marks the end of the line for David Bowie and his label Deram: it was the second single Bowie recorded that Deram rejected, despite the fact that, as with “Let Me Sleep Beside You,” Bowie was writing more commercial songs than he had in the past. It didn’t matter: Deram just wanted rid of him and Bowie left the label in April 1968.

So “In the Heat of the Morning” is a fragment of an uncompleted work. It was meant to be the centerpiece of Bowie’s second Deram LP, and Bowie and Tony Visconti do their best to shine it up: another luxurious strings arrangement, some odd instrumentation (guitar doubled with the Sooty Pixie Xylophone, the latter played by Tyrannosaurus Rex’s Steve Peregrin Took, who dubbed it the “Pixiephone”) and a Bowie vocal that’s ditched the Anthony Newley-isms for a sultrier, more commanding tone. Like “Sleep Beside You,” it’s basically a come-on with pretensions, but, hey, those can work sometimes.

First recorded in a BBC session on 18 December 1967, though the lyric was different and worse (“where cunning magpies steal your name“) and the opening riff hadn’t been developed yet. The proposed Deram single version was cut on 12 March 1968 and another BBC version was recorded a day later (as with “Karma Man,” the BBC version of this song might be its definitive recording—there’s more guitar, and Bowie’s vocal and the beat are much stronger, IMO). On Deram Anthology. Covered by The Last Shadow Puppets on their 2008 EP “The Age of The Understatement.”

The much-discussed surrender of John, Paul, George and Ringo to the soothing influence of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi makes, in my view, depressing reading…The unfortunate Beatles, like many of us, it seems, are in grave danger of coming into contact with the Spirit of Universal Truth, an unhelpful tipple which has in the past turned the great mind of Aldous Huxley to mystical blotting paper.

John Mortimer, The New Statesman, 29 September 1967.

There’s high, and there’s high, and to get really high—I mean so high you can walk on water, that high—that’s where I’m going. The answer’s not pot, but yoga and meditation, and working and discipline, working out your karma.

George Harrison, Holiday, February 1968.

All at once, or so it seemed, the pop aristocracy of the UK turned to “Eastern” religion. Seemingly everyone was now devising his or her personal path to enlightenment: Pete Townshend with Meher Baba, Richard Thompson with Sufi Islam, even Dave Davies was reading Vivekananda’s Rajah Yoga. And of course The Beach Boys, Donovan and The Beatles had found the Spiritual Regeneration teachings of the Maharishi, a sort of pop fusion of Buddhism, Hinduism and even stray bits of American “power of positive thinking” boosterism.

The mystery is explained in part when you consider that many of these people had been taking LSD in great doses for a long time (Tony Visconti and his wife tripped once a week for a whole year, for example, and Visconti eventually became a Tibetan Buddhist). Eastern teachings resounded with celebrities who were trying to make sense of a world in which “all limits had been magically removed” (Bernice Martin). Also appealing was that many of the Eastern religion varietals on display didn’t require much in terms of material renunciation or moral strictures from novitiates.

The “new” religions also had appeared in somewhat of a vacuum. Since the late ’50s, there had been a general falling off in religious observance among the young in the UK (you might recall John Lennon’s infamous “we’re more popular than Christ” comment was specifically about British teenagers). So Buddhism, Confucianism and Hinduism, particularly the watery blends offered by various celebrity mystics and sages, found little competition. Buddhism in particular was hip with the young because it had no ruling omniscient god who mandated antiquated moral codes, and its priest caste was best known for a) protesting war and b) wearing colorful psychedelic outfits. It was seemingly devoted solely to the “now,” and was misinterpreted as something of a Pop religion.

David Bowie had been studying Tibetan Buddhism since 1965, if not earlier. So while his “Karma Man,” which he cut a few days after The Beatles and their spouses had decamped (in a blaze of press coverage) for Bangor, Wales, to be initiated into the Maharishi’s teachings, may have seemed like a trendy affectation, it was actually a sequel to Bowie’s earlier Tibetan homage “Silly Boy Blue.”

That said, by late ’67, Tibetan Buddhism was just as trendy as the rest of the lot. For many weekend Buddhists, “Tibet” was something of an Atlantis in the mountains, the land of Shangri-La, the site of the Lost Continent of Mu; it was a magic kingdom in which everyone was holy and wasn’t hung up on material things. ITC’s 1968 TV drama The Champions, for example, featured secret agents crashing their plane in Tibet and being healed (and given superpowers) by lamas. (Identifying as a Tibetan Buddhist would eventually become a political act, as taking the side of the Tibetans drew down the wrath of the student Maoists of 1968, some of whom heckled Bowie’s mime performance Yet-San and the Eagle, which featured “Silly Boy Blue.”)*

So something has changed since the days of “Silly Boy Blue,” which was a realist attempt to depict Tibetan culture, to the point where it sounded a bit like a National Geographic article turned into a pop song. “Karma Man” is nowhere as literal—its title figure, clad in saffron robes and kneeling on the floor in meditation, is something of a Buddhist superhero (even the name’s right out of Doctor Strange). He seems akin to Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, with sigils and runes tattooed on his skin that offer lost wisdom and future prophecies. Bowie’s Karma Man is also now set in opposition to the West—the deceived and the blind mock him, consider him a carnival freak, and keep trying to slow him down.

Recorded on 1 September 1967 as the proposed B-side to “Let Me Sleep Beside You” (an attempt at nirvana for the flip side of an ode to maya); on Deram Anthology. A live recording (a BBC session arranged by Visconti on 13 May 1968 and available on Bowie at the Beeb) is so superior to the studio take that I think of the latter as merely a rough draft. A version was allegedly recorded for Toy: one of the few recordings from those sessions yet to leak.

Tony Visconti, a 22-year-old bass player from Brooklyn, came to the UK in April 1967 to illegally work as an apprentice record producer. He managed to convince Customs that he was traveling with four guitars because he was a dedicated vacationing musician who had to practice on each guitar daily. In New York he had caught the eye of British producer Denny Cordell by writing a complete arrangement for a Georgie Fame overdub session in an hour’s time, and once in the UK Visconti was put to work on tracks by The Move (“Cherry Blossom Clinic,” “Flowers In the Rain,” “Mist on a Monday Morning“) and Manfred Mann (“So Long Dad“).

Soon after David Bowie’s LP was released in June ’67, Visconti met Bowie at the office of David Platz, Cordell’s business partner and Bowie’s song publisher. Platz thought the two might hit it off as Visconti already had a reputation of being able to work with “hard to understand” artists (e.g., Marc Bolan, whose band Tyrannosaurus Rex Visconti would soon convince Cordell to sign). The first thing Visconti noticed was that Bowie had different-colored eyes. The two talked about American music for hours (both were fans of Ken Nordine‘s Word Jazz LPs), went for a walk in Chelsea, saw Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water together and had become fast friends by the end of the day. So when Bowie went in to record a new prospective single for Deram at summer’s end, he asked Visconti to arrange and produce it.

Bowie often has been reliant on his producers, using them as interpreters, mirrors, secondary composers, performers, muses and casting directors. Along with Gus Dudgeon, Visconti was the first of the major Bowie producers, and where Dudgeon’s work is that of someone fleshing out an unusual, occasionally brilliant sketchwork (the role George Martin often played with John Lennon), Visconti’s style is both practical in its studio realism and aggressive in its scope: feeding, then realizing, Bowie’s nascent ambitions.

Visconti helped convince Bowie to push “Let Me Sleep Beside You” as his next single, flattering Bowie by pronouncing the song “almost American.” Also, Bowie was dead broke—his LP had stiffed—so “Sleep Beside You” was a bald attempt to ape the success of the Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” (blunt requests were in vogue). It marks a turn away from the eccentricity and provincial theatrics of Bowie’s earlier Deram material, as “Sleep Beside You” is a basic rock & roll sex song, just sweetened up and given to putting on airs.

It’s a fairly basic composition—the chord progression of the verse (C-Bb-F) has become so cliched that it’s simply dubbed “the classic rock progression” in Richard Scott’s music theory guide (it’s used in everything from The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” to ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man”). Visconti offers stage settings and mood lighting: a cello section; a dominant bass that doubles Bowie’s initial sung hook; and drums (by Alan White, later of the Plastic Ono Band and Yes) that serve as accents and occasional fireworks—the acoustic guitar (Bowie?) is what really drives the track. The strings are a moody, luxurious contrast to the wind-based arrangements that had dominated Bowie’s first LP and “Laughing Gnome” single. In the first verse, the strings repeat a five-note pattern, then offer a series of long-held notes until, after the song peaks with the bridge, Visconti gives the cellists a whole eight-bar verse to sweep through.

What works is the restraint: Bowie and Visconti set up hooks but don’t overuse them (the opening distorted guitar riff (likely played by John McLaughlin) doesn’t appear again until the fadeout, for instance), while Bowie’s figured out how to best display his voice—go low on the verses, high and imperious on the bridge, where he’s trying to close the sale.

“Let Me Sleep Beside You” is a rake’s come-on in the well-worn style of AndrewMarvell and Robert Herrick—the singer frames his seduction as being empowering, the rake merely serving as a means of liberation. He appeals to youth’s vanity; he flatters his conquest with the promise of her alleged maturity: “Brush the dust of youth from off your shoulder/because the years of threading daisies lie behind you now,” Bowie murmurs, keeping a straight face. “Lock away your childhood…child, you’re a woman now/your heart and soul are free.” (Neil Diamond’s “Girl You’ll Be a Woman Soon” had been released as a single in April ’67, and so might have been an influence, but then again the late ’60s were rife with “girl, you’re a woman now” type of lyrics.)

It’s the most lustful Bowie song since “Liza Jane,” but as the track goes on, its aim seems less about Bowie bedding the girl than Bowie wanting to convince the listener that he really is a seductive, charismatic rock star (the promo film for the song, made in early 1969, has Bowie burlesquing the image of rock-star-as-sex-god, years before Ziggy). Bowie’s at last hit on the idea that a reflection, perfectly arranged, of an Elvis-Jagger figure will serve just as well as the original.

Recorded on 1 September 1967. Deram’s review board uniformly rejected it as a single, and it wouldn’t be released until the 1970 patchwork LP World of David Bowie that Deram issued to cash in on Bowie’s post-“Space Oddity” fame; on Deram Anthology.

Bowie’s first LP was essentially finished in mid-December 1966 but Deram sat on it for more than six months. In February 1967, Bowie cut two new tracks that became last-minute additions, leavening the album’s weirdness with more standard pop.

Much like “Sell Me a Coat,” “When I Live My Dream” has a lovely melody burdened with awkward lyrics (“the trees will play the rhythm of my dream” ?) and smothered (in later versions) by an overdone arrangement. Whenever Bowie deliberately tried to write for a mainstream audience in this period, as he appeared to be doing here, he fell into weak artifice. He could easily connect with the sad, the lost and the eccentric, but found it difficult to, basically, write for squares.

That said, Bowie and his manager Ken Pitt apparently thought “Dream” could be their break-through song and so kept flogging it despite the lack of label enthusiasm. A fairly spare initial version was soon followed by a remake with a sodden Ivor Raymonde arrangement, the latter version proposed as a single (Deram nixed it). Bowie pushed “Dream” for the rest of the decade—including it in the mime show Pierrot in Turquoise, recording a German version and making it the closing number of his “Love You Till Tuesday” promotional film. He finally gave up in July 1969, when Bowie performed “Dream” in a big-band arrangement at the International Song Festival competition in Valetta, Malta, and lost to a Spanish child prodigy named Cristina.

The song suffered from bad timing, in part—it reeked of stale sentiment and sounded corny when it was released in the summer of ’67. And the lyric, with its tired knights-and-castles imagery, its weak rhymes (“horse” paired with “voice”) and the occasional groan-inducing line like “tell them I’m a dreaming kind of guy,” is a real muddle. The singer’s been dumped and contents himself with imagining his lost lover in his dreams, but he also keeps putting off his illusions, as though he needs her legal consent to get things started. It builds up to the final histrionic verse where he assures her that he’ll only stalk her in his dreamworld.

Best suited as a cue for nostalgia, despite it having had no resonance in its own time. Leos Carax used it in 1984’s Boy Meets Girl, and Seu Jorge‘s version, recorded in 2004 for the Life Aquatic soundtrack, is likely the song’s finest interpretation. Singing most of it in Portuguese helped.

The first version was recorded on 25 February 1967, the remake on 3 June 1967 (both are on Deram Anthology).

Recorded in the second session for Bowie’s debut LP, “Did You Ever Have a Dream” only slipped out as a B-side almost a year later. It’s a bit odd that the track was so neglected as it’s one of the more straightforward pop songs Bowie recorded in the period, although its lyric is about the joys of astral projection.

Bowie could play both sides of the net at once: in the same session he lampooned ’60s hipsters with “Join the Gang,” he also dashed out a dippy song that seems desperately wedded to its period; it’s the sort of record that caters to the worst affectations of its audience.

Still, it’s fun enough in sparing doses. Inspirational verse: “You can walk around in New York while you sleep in Penge.”

Recorded 24 November 1966 and released in July 1967 as the b-side to “Love You Till Tuesday”; on the Deram Anthology.

I knew a girl like that. She ran our first fan club. She died of junk.

Ray Davies, to Jon Savage.

You’ve got what you wanted but you’re on your own.

“The London Boys.”

Pop records of the late ’60s are littered with runaways—teenagers leaving home, heading into the city for kicks and getting spent up. The Kinks have a host of them: “Little Miss Queen of Darkness,” damned to flirt and dance all night in a discotheque; Polly Garter, the provincial who slinks back home after being debauched, and the nameless girl in “Big Black Smoke” who winds up sleeping in cafes and whose “every penny…was spent on purple hearts and cigarettes.” There’s Miss Lonely in “Like a Rolling Stone” or the child sneaking away at daybreak in “She’s Leaving Home.” True to form, the Stones offer the most lurid scenario.

In Bowie’s “The London Boys,” a 17-year-old kid’s come to the city (the same exile from “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” perhaps) and is trying to work his way into the scene, which means pills, living rough and likely worse. (James Perone reads the lyric as being about a teenage girl getting caught up with the Mods, but it seems to fit better as a boy (gay or straight)’s song—but hey, this is far from the last sexually ambiguous Bowie lyric)). As the song builds, the kid becomes part of the pack, dressing sharp and pilled up: his dissolute triumph leaving him more alone than he was before.

It’s a crepuscular track, built around organ and bass, colored by winds and horns (the same pit orchestra from “Rubber Band,” here turned into specters). Bowie sings the first verses in a croaky, bleary voice, then turns to cabaret as the song ends (as if the London Boys are freezing on stage in a tableaux, the curtain about to fall). It may seem a thematic misstep, though you get the sense that Bowie’s view of reality at the time was something of a dark cabaret.

Bowie wrote “The London Boys” in 1965, first recording it late that year with The Lower Third for Pye (who rejected the track—it’s what Tony Hatch was referring to when he said Bowie wrote too much about dustbins). Bowie recorded it again for the audition that secured his Deram contract.

Recorded 18 October 1966 and released on 2 December 1966 as the b-side of “Rubber Band”; on Deram Anthology. Bowie’s US label, Decca, rejected the track because of the drug references, replacing it with Bowie’s childhood fantasy “There Is a Happy Land.”

Bowie’s first left turn. Suddenly gone are the soul inflections and the fuzzy guitars. Sam Cooke is deposed by Anthony Newley. The setting moves from the basement club to the provincial theater, and instead of youth and longing we get…withered memories of the Great War?

“Rubber Band” is Bowie’s first recording for Deram, a newly-founded subsidiary of Decca Records that was charged with making “artier,” for lack of a better word, pop. “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed and Bowie’s first LP are emblematic of the Deram style—“high concept” songs and LPs; dynamic sound engineering (or at least attempts at it); chamber arrangements, even full orchestras, instead of guitar-bass-drums; theatrics over blues roots.

By autumn 1966, Bowie was being managed by Ken Pitt, a cultured upper-class show business veteran who had a taste for the avant garde (though he later claimed he hated cabaret, he’s often taken the blame for Bowie’s taste for mime and cabaret in the late ’60s). Pitt served as a Henry Higgins figure for Bowie, taking him to West End gallery openings, first exposing him to Andy Warhol, the Velvets and Bob Dylan, housing Bowie in his Marylebone flat.

“Rubber Band,” which helped Bowie land his Deram contract when he recorded it for the label in a tryout session, is the first sign of his sudden shift in aesthetics. It opens in the orchestral pit, with a four-bar intro led by trumpet, oboe and tuba. The song’s quintet of verses trot along at a parade-march pace; the chorus is brief, simple and mainly serves as a breather between verses. There are attempts at musical color: after the third verse, a trumpet soars over groaning tuba (elation!), while after the final verse the tuba gets the last word (deflation!), slowing to a stop after the singer bewails his lost love.

It’s also an early sign of Bowie’s ability to be attuned, almost immediately, to changes in pop. The rise of British psychedelia brought with it a reclamation of childhood, young people dressing in their grandparents’ clothes, all neo-Edwardian brass bands and ’20s crooner pastiches. Around the same time Bowie cut “Rubber Band,’ the New Vaudeville Band released their #1 hit “Winchester Cathedral,” the Beatles were starting what would be the Sgt. Pepper sessions (“When I’m 64” being one of the first songs recorded) and even the Stones in Los Angeles were cutting lysergic vaudeville numbers like “Something Happened to Me Yesterday” and the kazoo-happy “Cool, Calm, Collected.”

All that said, “Rubber Band”‘s is a muddle at best and mostly an annoyance—is there anything sadder than a failed novelty song? Bowie’s set up a tidy song structure, a miniature garden with each verse of equal length and the horn solos neatly spaced apart. But there’s a disconnect between the song’s apparent intention to be a bit of camp nonsense and Bowie’s vocal, which slowly builds to the histrionic; he’s rarely in on the joke, and when he is, he just seems smug. As the PR release for the single put it, “it’s pathos set to tubas.”

The initial version of “Rubber Band,” released as a single, is better than the remake on the first Bowie LP—it’s at a faster tempo, Bowie sings more in his lower register, while the LP is almost all upper-octaves and thus far more irritating, and I’ll take the strange disconnected bit of a woman wailing during the single fadeout over Bowie sniffing “I hope you break your baton!” at the end of the LP cut.

Recorded 18 October 1966 and released in December as Deram DM 107 (the remake was cut on 25 February 1967); on theDeram Anthology.